Forgach received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking and graphic design from the College of the Dayton Art Institute and her Master of Fine Arts from Kent State University. Shortly after graduation she founded Exeter Press, a studio for collaborative projects, in Ohio. By 1978 she had moved to Manhattan, where she re-established Exeter Press. The Press eventually took up most of a loft on Mercer Street, in Soho, where she lived with her husband, Vijay Dhawan, a brain researcher at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island. Not interested in production sheet-making, Forgach preferred to concentrate on short-run editions, suites, and unique pieces made in collaboration with other artists at Exeter Press. Some of the artists she worked with over the years had already worked extensively in handmade paper, while others were introduced to the medium's possibilities by Forgach. The long roster of artists who worked with her at Exeter includes Lynda Benglis, Terence LaNoue, George Sugarman, Suzanne Anker, Al Loving, Belgian artist Nicolle Caillebout, and Alun Leach-Jones and Gretchen Albrecht, both from New Zealand. Exeter Press gained a reputation in hand papermaking circles for producing quality sculptural and low-relief work, often using intense color. The space at Exeter was small but well-equipped. Forgach had two vats, to accommodate 22" x 30" and 30" x 40" moulds; a 1.5 lb. Valley beater and a Lightnin' Mixer; a Dake paper press; and a Griffin combination lithography and etching press. For most of her sheet forming, Forgach relied on large deckle-boxes counter-weighted by means of an overhead pulley system. Forgach was an excellent teacher and Exeter Press became a training ground for many assistants. In addition, Forgach taught at the School of Visual Arts and the Center for Book Arts, and offered classes at Exeter Press for the New York Studio Program of the Great Lakes Colleges of Art Association. Forgach was frequently invited to give workshops and seminars, in the United States and elsewhere. In October 1978 she assisted Lynda Benglis in a series of workshops at the Kalimakusch Papermill in Ahmedabad, India. She was invited to work, in 1982 and again in 1988, at the Gandhi Dershan Papermill, also in India. In 1989 and 1990 she gave workshops and lectured at various art academies in the former Yugoslavia. While there, she exhibited her work at the American Embassy and the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Belgrade, and at the City Museum of Skopje. In her artwork Forgach had always been interested in other cultures. She appropriated artifacts to allude to ancient and exotic civilizations, and to comment on the passing of time and its effect on world culture and the individual. Narratives occur in and through the passage of time, and Forgach was interested in capturing the flow of narrative time in static works of and on paper. In her later work she incorporated collage and printmaking techniques, frequently making use of photographic imagery as well as some bravura drawing. The pieces she did for a one-person show at the Ottawa School of Art in 1990 would turn out to be her last body of individual, non-collaborative work. In these Forgach used photographic imagery as "fragments of reality," building and layering both personal and universal symbols into pieces intended to trace the passage of time and the changes associated with it. The show's curator, Jeff Stellick, wrote in the catalog essay: Fragments�a pair of smiling lips, a detail of one eye, shards of an ear, a nose, etc.�evoke the sensory elements that are the fuel for the symbolic and holistic "record keeping" that Forgach is concerned with. . . . The literary aspect of these images is sometimes aided by handwritten notations that provide additional visual clues to other ideas . . . . Forgach hopes to lure the viewer through an expanse of reconstructed time. Where these images end, the imagination continues. Because of her interest in narrative, Forgach's visual work had gradually taken on an almost rebus-like character, with stories told through pictures. In April of 1990 she met the person whose creative influence would take her to the next step. While touring Yugoslavia, lecturing on and demonstrating Japanese papermaking, Forgach met poet Milan Milisic in his hometown of Dubrovnik. The two discovered that they shared similar interests and philosophies about their work. Responding to a portfolio he had created in 1986 with printmaker Luksa Peko, Forgach invited Milisic to collaborate with her. Milisic's poetry would be printed on Forgach's handmade paper, which would also incorporate her printed and pulp-painted images. By December of 1990, Milisic had written more than forty poems for the project and sent them to Maia Herman, a Yugoslav writer who lives in New York. Herman selected twelve of the poems and translated them into English. During meetings in the Spring of 1991, while Milisic was in residence as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the collaborators decided to call the portfolio Stains. To produce the paper for Stains, Forgach used a combination of Spanish flax and cotton linter. The pulp was pigmented in small batches and as many as five colors of pulp were swirled together in the deckle box, resulting in sheets that appeared marbled. Forgach then developed an image, painting with overbeaten linen pulp. She also extended her color by painting on small Foamcore shapes, using a mixture of powdered pigment and methyl cellulose, and then offsetting that color by hand onto the freshly made sheet. While paper production was going on, Forgach and Milisic consulted with Yugoslav artist Jelena Trpkovic and graphic designer Cedomir Kostovic. A typeface was chosen, layouts were developed, and flat wooden clamshell boxes were designed to protect the edition. The participants decided to silk-screen the text and remaining imagery, and another Yugoslavian in exile, Nenad Bozic, printed the edition. Bozic used an ink modified to be absorbed into the paper and not sit on its surface. He printed up to five colors on some of the sheets. The edition is limited to fifty portfolios, each of which consists of a title page, a contents and colophon page, and the twelve sheets bearing the poems and graphics. The sheets are all 14.5" x 22" and are housed in the boxes, the outsides of which bear the silkscreened title. On October 5, 1991, two weeks after the completion of Stains, Milan Milisic was killed when a mortar shell fell on his kitchen in Dubrovnik. Devastated by the loss of her friend and collaborator, Forgach nevertheless applied to the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), an organization like the Fulbright Foundation, for a grant to produce another collaborative portfolio. Similar to Stains, this new project would involve about a dozen Czech poets and the same number of faculty and advanced students from the Fine Arts Academy in Prague. Each poet was to submit a recent work; each visual artist would then choose a poem and respond to it in a paper work. Forgach envisioned the poems being printed directly onto the paper pieces they had inspired, with the text in both the original language and English. Forgach received the grant in 1992, and left New York in May of that year to begin the project. She established ties at the centuries-old Velke Losiny papermill in northern Moravia, where most of the papermaking for the project was actually conducted. She also helped set up a rudimentary paper studio at the Academy. All those involved were very excited about the project, especially since nothing similar had been done up to that time in the Czech Republic. Forgach was even able to secure the participation of Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, the internationally published poet and essayist. Once in Prague, Forgach found the logistics of the original project somewhat more daunting and the opportunities for other lectures and workshops more exciting than she had expected. What she had planned as a year-long residency eventually stretched into a European stay of four years altogether, supported by a second IREX grant (to Slovenia, for 1994-95) and by private funds. Despite the enthusiasm of the participants, the project, which they titled Words & Hands, ran into difficulties. There were language problems; necessary equipment, tools, and supplies were hard to come by; funding was tight; it was difficult to get such a large group of artists and writers to meet deadlines; and at least some of the writers felt their work was overshadowed by the visual component of the portfolio. (In fact, Forgach had always thought of the project as a portfolio of visual works on and of paper, supported by the contributions of the writers.) As it progressed, the portfolio underwent seemingly constant revision. When Forgach died early in 1997, only a few of the artists had completed their contributions�prints and pulp-paintings on handmade paper�and major questions concerning the typography and overall design remained to be worked out. Words & Hands is now under the direction of Vladimir Kokolia, Professor of Printmaking at the Fine Arts Academy in Prague. He is considering publishing just the completed images, with the accompanying texts printed separately. Forgach was dedicated to finishing Words & Hands. In conversation she described the project as both a summing-up of her career to date and an early step into a new phase of her work. She had begun to write seriously and was considering the idea of a new portfolio, with her own writings and images. She was excited about where these ideas would take her and eager to begin working on them. She is deeply missed.
